Page 19 of Den of Iniquity

“A year or so after he came to live with me. He was still in eighth grade at the time.” Matilda paused and wiped a single tear from her eye. “So much bad stuff. It’s hard to come back from something like that.”

“Yes, it is,” I agreed.

“Once Darius got to high school, he was totally out of control, even before he met that she-devil, Gypsy. After that it was all downhill.”

“Tell me about her.”

Matilda sighed. “Her name was Gypsy Tomkins. Her daddy was the local drug dealer so she had money to burn. As far as the kids at school were concerned, she was practically royalty. She was a beauty all right, but wild as they come and dangerous, too. If she was wearing boots, you could count on her having a knife hidden inside one of them. Why she picked Darius out of the crowd and turned him into her personal property, I’ll never know, but she did. I saw through that little bitch, pardon the expression, the moment I met her, but Darius never did. He was nothing but a lovesick puppy in her hands.

“Everybody thinks that in domestic violence cases it’s always the man,” Matilda continued, “but not with Gypsy. I heard from some of Darius’s friends that she liked to flirt with other guys in front of him, just to make him jealous. The two of them fought constantly, and when those fights turned violent, by the time cops showed up, who do you think they blamed? Not pretty little Miss Priss, that’s for sure. Their last fight, she pulled a knife on him. He managed to get the knife away from her, but she ended up with a cut on her hand. According to the cops, he was the one at fault.”

“That’s when he went to jail?” I asked.

Matilda nodded. “He did six months for assault. Once Darius got out he learned that, in the meantime, she’d gone to court and taken out a restraining order. He couldn’t even go home for his things.”

“How long did he live with you?”

“For close to a year before he died. A friend of mine helped himget a job, and I could tell that he had cleaned up his act. He was working steady and going to church.”

“Where he met Gina,” I supplied.

Matilda nodded.

“What happened to Gypsy?”

“She and her boyfriend both were murdered, shot to death in an alley in downtown Seattle a few months after Darius got out of jail on her bogus assault charge. It was most likely a drug deal gone bad, but naturally the cops came looking for Darius, thinking he was responsible. At the time, he was working as a bouncer at a place called Jojo’s. It’s an unsavory dive in a bad neighborhood, so they have security cameras everywhere. They had video of Darius on the job during the time Gypsy was killed. Even so, the cops still had him take a lie detector test, which he passed with flying colors.”

“They cleared him?”

Matilda nodded again. “More or less, but as far as I know, that case is still unsolved, and so is Darius’s.”

“Getting back to his case,” I said, “was there any indication of a robbery gone bad?”

“No,” Matilda replied. “Nothing was taken.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Absolutely. This is what they gave me when they brought me his personal effects.” She reached down beside her chair and produced another envelope, a brown manila one this time, which she passed over to me. It was preprinted with the local M.E.’s return address, and the flap was held down by the attached metal clip.

“May I?” I asked.

She nodded. I opened the envelope and shook out the contents: a cheap Timex watch—no longer ticking—a long-dead iPhone, a worn brown wallet, and some pocket change.

Of all the items, the phone seemed to be the most promising. If it could be unlocked and brought back to life, it might reveal all kinds of information about Darius’s last days on earth. Among the coins I found something I recognized—a one-year chip from Narcotics Anonymous.

“How long had Darius been out of jail before he died?” I asked.

“A little under a year,” Matilda said. “Why?”

I handed her the chip. “Having that chip means he’d been drug free for at least a year, so he must have started with Narcotics Anonymous while he was still incarcerated.”

Matilda nodded. “That’s what he told me. He was very proud of that.”

“You saw no evidence that he had slipped?”

She shook her head. “None.”

“And you didn’t find anything related to drug use in his room after his death?”

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